john joins me now from providence, rhode island. we were talking a couple of months ago here at cnn about this book of yours and i immediately, when i saw the news out of brazil, i thought of you, rhode island, the pyrotechnics, the foam you brought in to show us how highly flammable it was. there were many similarities, were there not? >> hello, brooke, yes. this is like a recurrent nightmare. there were many parallel facts, at least as brazil's situation has been reported. >> run through a couple of them. what else? what else was similar? >> well, according to initial reports we have improper use of pyrotechnics in an unsuitable venue, we have flammable wall coverings, we have gross overcrowding as we had at the station. and we have staff that seems woefully undertrained to deal with emergencies. >> i read your opinion piece on cnn.com and you wrote this, you would think the world would have learned from it, you would be wrong. you go through what happened in rhode island what happened in bangkok, russia, argentina. what needs to